Are we saying he was skirting the ban because he was having an affair with a Chinese spy? That seems like a stretch. Jensen was ideologically opposed to a ban, he didn't need any coaxing in that regard.

It was illegal, and I'm sure if this comes to light there will be (major) repercussions, but I don't see it as an immoral move.

However the fact he was having an affair muddies the waters on the two. At best, the optics look bad to someone outside. Yes, he could have been opposed for money reasons, and that’s a position that needs no more explanation.

But how do we know he wasn’t being whispered to by the smoking baddie he was trying to impress? Maybe he’d not have taken the risk were he not having this affair but we know what men do when their ego is on the line. Case in point: Musk paying people to play PoE for him and losing his shit when he was caught.

Do I think money is a good enough explanation? Yes. Could I believe that what’s in his pants also played a part? Also yes.

People at this level get intoxicated with their power. They think they are invincible and can do whatever they want. Often they can. Sometimes it all comes crashing down, here for example, or the case of Eric Swalwell. But they never think it will happen to them.

"It's not immoral to violate trade sanctions if you don't think they should exist".

Can you make the case for trade sanctions being a moral issue?

It would depend on the reason for the sanctions...

If the sanctions are to prevent buying the products of slavery, that's a moral issue, and violating the sactions is also a moral issue.

Same deal if the sanctions are to prevent selling things that will be used to carry out genocide/etc. That's a moral issue, so violating the sanctions is a moral issue.

I don't think there's an alegation that the GPUs will be used for immoral purposes, just that the US government has national security concerns. Those concerns may or may not be valid, and may or may not be served by having trade sanctions applied effectively, but I don't think that's a question of morality.

It's not de facto immoral to violate the law. It could be immoral to violate the law and conceal it.

> It would depend on the reason for the sanctions...

But then it would be the thing that is sanctioned that is the immoral activity, not the breaking of a sanction, right?

It's like you said, unlawful != immoral.

I think you can make a case that breaking a rule intended to prevent immoral activity is in and of itself immoral, even if breaking the rule didn't result in the immoral activity.

It's arguable either way, morality isn't a formal logic. There's no right answer, and it's mostly judged by popular consensus... If there is a final authority, they don't publish their notes. :p

It would be immoral to sell weapons to your nation's enemies but not to your allies.

Unless you're saying that disloyalty and betrayal are not issues of morality.

It's very interesting to read here that Jensen is immoral for betraying his wife but not for betraying his country.

Isn't the specific trade law being broken related to arms control and dual-use technology?

IMO it's not a terribly strong case to make while Boeing sells whole jetliners to China, but the law was put in place for both moral and practical reasons.

Absolutely. Immoral and illegal/unlawful are separate things alogether.

Sure, why not? Morality and law are not always aligned. I'm not sure I would go so far to consider these sorts of trade sanctions "immoral", but I wouldn't fault someone for believing so.

In this case, though, I think Huang just believed these sanctions were the wrong move, and would end up long-term helping China and hurting the US. Which is fair to believe, but believing a law is counterproductive doesn't give you immunity if you break it.

> Morality and law are not always aligned

This is a significant philosophical point.

  The thing about that Lord Moulton said is that there are a bunch of things that are wrong that are not illegal, and we have to do that because people have to be capable of self-control. Patrick Deneen, in . . . The Failure of Liberalism said that he thinks liberalism is failing because it has come to the view that anything that is not illegal is moral. 

https://www.econtalk.org/public-choice-and-politics-without-....

Is it immoral for Jensen to cheat on his wife?

What if he "believed fidelity was the wrong move" and that he'd end up divorced eventually anyways?

When is disloyalty and dishonesty immoral?

It’s something you are not equipped to judge. You don’t know much about his private life and the private life of the people around him. Having sex in itself is not the problem, and so far what was demonstrated was that he had sex, at least one with an alleged spy evading trade sanctions, and once with a subordinate. Either are improper and ground for firing; both together are untenable (plus the possibility that there are other skeletons; we don’t know for now).

The relationship with his wife is neither here nor there, unless she wants to make it public. If she feels betrayed, wants a quick buck, or otherwise wants to for any reason, she will sue for divorce and, considering the publicity of the cases, she should get a favourable judgement.

It’s easy to impose our morals on others. But more than half of republicans believe that gay sex is immoral just as strongly as you believe that adultery is.

He was playing both sides and got caught. Nothing more.

No, he probably wasn't doing it because of the Chinese spy. But when you are sleeping with a Chinese spy people are going to have questions.

The board should be fired next for allowing a CEO to have 60 direct reports and no succession plan.

It turned them into one of the most valuable companies in history. The board can figure out succession now.

Is that the reason? Or is it that they happened to make a product that became very in demand?

"happened"?

You say that as if a lottery assigns companies what product they shall make. Or that they found their product designs in a kinder egg.

They had an idea which they thought will be valuable. And they worked bery hard on making that idea a reality.

People complain that companies don’t have leadership with long term vision. The leadership of NVIDIA heard the idea of GGPU computation and put the resources behind the idea to make it a practical reality. Here the gap between “nerdy idea” to “product sells like hot-cakes”, is measured in decades. That is not just luck.

This take is crazy; NVIDIA not only built the GPU, *they created the demand.* For a very long time there was nothing like CUDA. They're working on an open-source self-driving car. Back when they were a gaming company, they sponsored the gaming ecosystem.

Jensen Huang cheated on his wife AND conspired to evade arms control regulations, but he's still a genius.

You're getting downvoted for this, but it has some merit. It could be argued that NVDA's flat structure is what led to the company's success - Jensen himself greenlit the development of CUDA from the anecdotes I've heard. However, in the last 2 or 3 years the board should have pushed for more redundancy and a succession plan.

Since NVDA had such a flat corporate structure with Huang having ~60 direct reports, I expect that the company will be lost for a period of time as they try to get their bearings. This is an opportunity for AMD, INTC and others.

Ok, but the goalposts are shifting. This started as "look how flustered he got when asked about China. That means he did it".

Um it's absolutely possible to break the rules set in place by a country and help it in doing so. No clue whether that's the case here

Sure but that's not the point here: he was getting frustrated in the interview because he was getting second guessed by someone who doesn't have as much insight has he does. Dude is the founder of Nvidia by the way.